Paula Allen: Mystery of Sears murals remains

Updated 12:01 am, Sunday, March 6, 2011

I seem to remember a column that you wrote last year about the murals in the Sears store on Southwest Military Drive. We've questioned all those of the Sears retirees that we know, and no one knows what happened. They were supposedly removed and rolled up and were supposed to be donated to a museum. We will be holding our annual Sears Club dinner meeting in April, and I'd like to be able to report some progress.

Rachel Edwards Ridder

Last week's column recapped the one that ran Jan. 31, 2010: The murals painted by Eugene A. Montgomery were removed during a 1984 remodeling and stored at least for a time in the store manager's office. Titled “The San Antonio Story,” they chronicled major events in San Antonio and Texas history from American Indian settlements to the present, as it was when the murals were completed in 1954.

After the Sears, Roebuck & Co. store at the Military Plaza shopping center closed in 1993, the murals' fate remains a blank. Last year's column established that there is no record of their having been received by the city for use in the Convention Center or at San Antonio International Airport, nor does Sears' parent corporation know what happened to them. Last week's column polled staff at the Witte and McNay museums and the Institute of Texan Cultures; none of these institutions has the murals nor any record of having been offered them.

After sending this query, letter-writer Ridder remembered hearing that Sears area manager Jerry Erler “paid a lot” to have the murals removed carefully. The work was done by art conservator Richard White, who later relocated to New Orleans and is now semi-retired in Columbia, Miss. In a telephone interview, White recalled working on an elevated platform to remove the oil-on-canvas murals, which were placed 6 or 7 feet off the floor to protect them from being touched or brushed up against by passing shoppers.

As White remembers, the murals were being taken down because the north and south walls to which they were attached were to be knocked down in a reconfiguration of the store. As the canvases came off the walls, they were rolled into cardboard tubes of about 12 inches in diameter, with plastic sheeting between each layer of canvas and the next. The completed rolls — three or four of them in White's memory — were then wrapped with heavy-duty plastic.

The murals at that time were in good shape, says the conservator, without any need of restoration. While the paintings may not have been top-drawer fine art, says White, “They were quite presentable, and their importance was that they presented a pictorial history of the city.” Although he has not kept business records from that period, he remembers being able to remove all the panels without causing any tears in the canvas or losing any paint. At the time, he says, “They were in condition to be reattached in a new space.”

Where that new space was to be was something that seems not to have been settled at the time. White remembers hearing about their being offered to the city, but if that was the case, they seem not to have been installed, and records of the gift have not survived. “(The murals) could be in a warehouse somewhere,” he suggests. As long as they have been kept rolled and wrapped in a dry place, White says, “They should be in perfect condition.”

That's better than the fate of some of the other murals Montgomery painted for Sears. From 1939 to the late '60s, the artist was commissioned by Sears to paint locally themed murals in stores all over the country, with Houston's main store being the first to one in Phoenix as the last, writes Deborah Mergele Anderson in the May 1978 issue of the Sears Southwesterner, a regional company newsletter.

Of the 12 store murals painted by Montgomery, an Evanston, Ill.-based artist, only a few were still extant even then. Anderson, who worked in the Military Plaza store for nine years during the 1970s, reports that by 1978, the Houston and Charlotte, N.C., murals had been painted over, and the Denver murals had been lost to fire. The San Antonio murals, painted for the store's grand opening, told the city's story in 13 panels, including the arrival of the Canary Islands settlers, independence from Spain and then Mexico, the first bridge across the San Antonio River, German immigration, statehood, the Civil War and the coming of the railroad, ending with a contemporary scene of the River Walk during Fiesta San Antonio. Because the store was located in a city with four air bases and an Army post, Anderson notes, “Many customers are from other states or countries. (For them,) the murals explain(ed) San Antonio's past and a good part of Texas history.”

Returning to the store to visit a friend some years after she had quit, Anderson also remembers seeing them rolled up in the store manager's office. She, too, hopes they will come to light someday to be reinstalled in some public space. “They were such a treasure to me,” she says. “What a shame to think that they may be lost to history.”

E-mail Paula Allen at historycolumn@yahoo.com. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/sahistorycolumn.